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Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
289•theblazehen•2d ago•95 comments

Software Engineering Is Back

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
20•alainrk•1h ago•11 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
34•AlexeyBrin•1h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
15•onurkanbkrc•1h ago•1 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
717•klaussilveira•16h ago•218 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
978•xnx•21h ago•562 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
94•jesperordrup•6h ago•35 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
4•nar001•35m ago•2 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
138•matheusalmeida•2d ago•36 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
74•videotopia•4d ago•11 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
16•matt_d•3d ago•4 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
46•helloplanets•4d ago•46 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
242•isitcontent•16h ago•27 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
242•dmpetrov•16h ago•128 comments

Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2

https://medium.com/lensesio/cross-region-msk-replication-a-comprehensive-performance-comparison-o...
4•andmarios•4d ago•1 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
344•vecti•18h ago•153 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
510•todsacerdoti•1d ago•248 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
393•ostacke•22h ago•101 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
309•eljojo•19h ago•192 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
361•aktau•22h ago•187 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
437•lstoll•22h ago•286 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
32•1vuio0pswjnm7•2h ago•31 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
73•kmm•5d ago•11 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
26•bikenaga•3d ago•13 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
98•quibono•4d ago•22 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
278•i5heu•19h ago•227 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
43•gmays•11h ago•14 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1088•cdrnsf•1d ago•469 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
312•surprisetalk•3d ago•45 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
36•romes•4d ago•3 comments
Open in hackernews

Doom song on the Oldest Digital Computer in America [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no0CkQk7id0
50•zdw•9mo ago

Comments

notachatbot123•8mo ago
*a song from Doom
ChrisMarshallNY•8mo ago
To be fair, it also does the graphics, but on a line printer, one frame per page.

Not exactly realtime.

amichal•8mo ago
Does it? I watched this video and the explanation of how they (mostly Bill in Vermont) did it had barely enough room for the song data. I think the line graphics might have been some good story telling
mystified5016•8mo ago
It was likely just a proof of concept run in the emulator. I'd guess it would be wildly impractical to get even that version of doom on real paper tape
TheOtherHobbes•8mo ago
The first version of Doom was around 2.4MB. ASR33 8-bit tape is 10 chars/inch.

So that's around 20 kilofeet of tape, or 440 miles.

jandrese•8mo ago
Sadly there is no chance that machine did anything close to rendering those printouts. The Bendix has about 8kb of memory and no random access storage so rendering even a single room using raycasting (instead of the BSPs that Doom uses) is a stretch, and adding an output routine is just going to blow your memory budget. You can't even use those 8kb of memory like an old microcomputer, it's arranged as 2,200 29 bit words. It might just be possible to have it render a single simple box room using raycasting into some kind of data structure in memory, and then load an output routine from paper tape to print it out, but even that will require the programmer to be very clever.
icameron•8mo ago
Ah yes, and I watched all 29 minutes to find out. It was still very interesting though and I’m still impressed. Not sure what the terminal program they showed at the beginning was, but the thing only “plays doom” (theme song)
mitkebes•8mo ago
Yeah I felt like that part was misleading, and undercut how cool of an accomplishment this actually was.

I would also be quicker to accept it if they stated really clearly at the beginning that it actually only plays a song, but it instead left me watching the whole video waiting for them to get to explaining how the got the actual game working.

alnwlsn•8mo ago
I think he should also go for the other meaning of "plays doom" and set it up as a sequencer which sends keyboard and mouse inputs, like a 900 pound TASbot.
datameta•8mo ago
The magnetic drum memory/storage is a fascinating precursor to RAM and hard drives, performing both functions simultaneously. The vacuum tubes only store the next set of processor instructions to be executed
jandrese•8mo ago
That experience when you start playing around with circuit design and are shocked at just how many transistors it takes to make a simple latch.

Now think about doing that with bulky and hot vacuum tubes and you quickly realize that you can't have any reasonable quantity of RAM without making the computer the size of a room. The vacuum tubes are just your registers and you need to be clever with the memory and storage. This is also why we don't use SRAM very much even today.

Can you imagine what a leap forward Core Memory was at the time? Not having to wait on a spinning drum to get around to reading the memory line you needed is like going from hard drives to SSDs.

Also, if any old timers remember the Story of Mel this is the class of computer Mel was working on.

datameta•8mo ago
I'll never forget the UNIVAC's mercury delay line memory in the Computer History museum - that just absolutely blew my mind and showed me how non-trivial of a problem memory was in early computers before even core came around
teddyh•8mo ago
Fake clickbait.